Keeping Up or Keeping Ahead? Intelligence vs. Media Reporting on Foreign Affairs

• In Event: US Foreign Policy

Abstract

What informational advantages -- if any -- do intelligence bureaucracies provide leaders? Intelligence gathering is a costly endeavor for governments, ostensibly granting leaders access to valuable and sensitive information that can create advantages in diplomacy and war. But does intelligence keep ahead or struggle to keep up with the traditional news media? No previous studies have used declassified intelligence reporting to systematically assessed whether, when, and how national intelligence agencies compare to national media reporting.

This paper provides a novel comparison of two unique text corpora: the President's Daily Brief and the New York Times. Over four presidencies covering 1961 to 1977, we now have access to the daily summary of insights from the intelligence community in the form of the President's Daily Brief (PDB) -- the American intelligence bureaucracy's premier document. We compare each of 4,980 PDBs with contemporaneous coverage of foreign affairs in the New York Times, totaling several hundred thousand articles in all. We use computational text-as-data techniques to identify similarities and differences in the content and prioritization of foreign policy issues. Doing so allows us to assess, at the daily level, what information advantage intelligence collection and analysis confers on leaders.

We find evidence that, for some issue areas, intelligence products like the PDB appear to provide a meaningful and quantifiable information advantage, both in terms of early warning of events not yet publicly reported and uncovering dynamics entirely overlooked by the news media. Yet we also find evidence that, in some important issue areas and situations, leaders would be equally well-served with that day's edition of the New York Times. Overall, the paper's analysis offers a rare opportunity to comprehensively analyze, with high levels of granularity and variation, the insights provided by a highly-curated intelligence summary for top American leaders versus concurrent news reporting. The findings offer contributions to scholarly debates about information asymmetries, leaders, bureaucracy, and strategic surprise. The study also has important implications for policy and democracy, given the magnitude of resources devoted to intelligence collection and analysis by governments.

Authors

• Eric Min, UCLA

• Austin Carson, University of Chicago